A short interview excerpt with trader Adrian Reid discussing how his interest in active, technical trading clashed with his family’s buy-and-hold investing mindset. He describes the long hours of chart work, technical analysis, and the difficulty of explaining trading’s uncertainty and effort to people unfamiliar with it.
You mentioned that you were speaking to your father about how do I retire and trading was an option. What kind of feedback did you get from your family and friends about you wanting to be a trader?
My family's experience at the time, buy and hold good stocks forever, grow gradually, get some dividends. Not terrible advice, but for me, not great because I have a much shorter attention span than that. I'm much more technically oriented. I'm fascinated by the movements in the market. Market. I'm interested to see how do people get in and out more actively and make money. So there was a disconnect between my family's experience and what I was interested in. When I started trading, I was spending four or five hours a night researching and looking at charts. And particularly when I was going through my technical analysis phase, I was looking at dozens and dozens of charts every night and checking indicators and lines and levels and trying to make decisions. And it was hard work, long work and uncertainty. That's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't understand trading. It's like, what you mean all you're gonna do is press a button, get signals and place trades and you think you're gonna make money? Like what?
Yeah.
There's some challenge we've got with our community because our community, our circle, typically doesn't understand trading. And this is one of those reasons that it's hard.
